The other day, I needed to get an identification card replaced. The transaction required a password entry. Do you think I could remember it? I kept drawing a blank. Frustrating! If you’ve ever been around me when I can’t remember or have to create a new password, you’ll hear me repeat:
“If I were king of the world, I’d have all passwords eliminated!” (more…)
Commander George Ericson is crouched on the bridge of his corvette warship. He’s peering through a sighting device, lining up his counterattack against an enemy he can’t see, a submerged U-boat in the Atlantic waters directly ahead of him.
“What’s it look like now, Number One?” Ericson calls to his first officer, who is on a sonar device.
“It’s the firmest contact we’ve ever had,” the sonar operator shouts back from below deck.
There’s sudden consternation on Cmdr Ericson’s face. Merchant sailors whose ship has just been torpedoed are thrashing about in the water. They’re shouting for help. “There’s men in the water just about there,” Ericson says.
“Well, there’s a U-boat just underneath them.”
It’s the way he cajoles strangers into friendly conversation. And at age 99, it seems to have worked pretty well for Simeon Mayou. He points out some of the commemorative pins and service medals he wears on his Royal Navy blazer. Then, he pulls his beret off the table and asks for help.
“Just hold the edge of the beret,” he says, “and help me put it on.” (more…)
She clutched the folded papers in her hands for quite some time. When the officer on board HMCS Sackville called upon her, she knew it was her turn to speak. Then, though unaccustomed to public speaking, Catherine Wilson stepped forward in front of the warship’s company and other civilians assembled there, unfolded the speech, and began:
“My father, John Wallace Potter – better known as Potts – was born on March 10, 1922, in Toronto,” she said. “It took him three attempts to enlist before the Royal Canadian Navy finally accepted him in May 1941.” (more…)
It seemed all the world came to Nanton, Alberta, on the August 24-25, 2018 weekend. This small southern Alberta town – home to about 2,000 people under normal circumstances – played host to a special late summer event. People travelled from across Canada and the U.S. to attend the 75th anniversary commemoration of Bomber Command’s famous Dam Buster raid of 1943.
“They breached the dams,” author Ted Barris said, “and turned the tide of the Second World War.”
HarperCollins publishers and author Ted Barris joined the Bomber Command Museum of Canada, at Nanton, in a pre-publication date launch of Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany, Ted Barris’s 18th non-fiction book. The official publication date is Sept. 11, 2018.
In addition to regular patrons of the museum, event organizers managed to attract the members of families representing 16 of the 30 Canadians who participated in the famous raid on the Ruhr River dams on May 16-17, 1943.
In the Second World War, when Nazi Germany threatened the very existence of Britain, the Royal Air Force called on its military aviators, and thousands more from around the Commonwealth, to take the war to its enemies. Under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Command often put a thousand aircraft per night in the air against Nazi targets. More than 55,000 aircrew died in those actions, 10,000 of them Canadians. Perhaps the most daring bombing attack happened after weeks of secret training of the Lancaster crews to conduct a low-level raid on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams; the crews breached the first two dams, damaged the third, and crippled production in the Ruhr valley substantially. But the cost was dear; 53 of the 133 airmen died in the raid.
On Friday night, the BCMC hosted a meet-and-greet with just the 50-or-so members of the families of the Canadian airmen who participated in the raid. Nearly half of the 30 Canadians who flew from England that night, did not survive this hi-risk mission. Barris spoke to the families at the Friday social, applauding their commitment to come from so far to pay tribute to their fathers, uncles or grandfathers who’d served in Operation Chastise, which unleashed the famous bouncing bomb against the hydo-electirc dams of industrialized Nazi Germany.
That evening members of the BCMC Lancaster crew brought out their prized Ian Bazelgette Memorial Lanc (altered temporarily to show the markings of one of the Dam Buster bombers – AJ-M). The crew not only fired up the Lancs Merlin engines, but spun a replica Upkeep bouncing bomb in the Lancs belly complete with aldis-lamp attitude lamps, while 200 museum visitors watched.
On Saturday afternoon, Barris presented a 70-minute talk/presentation to walk the audience – about 700 visitors in the BCMC hangar – through the details of the dams raid, but more importantly to tell the stories of the Canadian airmen who took part. With a number of Air Force personnel in the audience as well, Barris made sure nobody left the room without knowing just how powerful the Canadian role in the attack had been; he mimicked a line in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters, in which a British RAF officer notes in preparation for the raid, “We mustn’t forget the English.”
Barris pointed out emphatically, “No. We mustn’t forget the Canadians!”
It’s a repeating theme in much of his published work, but this week perhaps more than most, Ted Barris’s focus on unheralded Canadian heroism during the Second World War appears to have some resonance.
In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the famous bombing raid against the Ruhr River valley war munitions factories of the Third Reich, Ted Barris offered his first ever talk/presentation on the story of the famous “Dam Busters” raid at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton.
About 500 museum members, history buffs, some veterans and the general public filled seats in front of the museum’s WWII Lancaster inside the main hangar to hear the talk. Barris borrowed a comment from one of the Royal Air Force officers featured in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters who told Guy Gibson, the wing commander of No. 617 Squadron, “We mustn’t forget the English” when hand-picking airmen for the raid.
“We mustn’t forget the Canadians,!” Barris emphasized in response.
During the 50-minute presentation, Barris drew on research, interviews and narrative featured in his forthcoming book, Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany, to be published by HarperCollins this year. The raid on May 16-17, 1943 required 19 specially modified Lancaster bombers to travel at treetop altitude – less than 100 feet off the ground and the water – from Scampton air base in Britain to the Ruhr Valley in the heart of Germany to attempt to destroy the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams. They breached the first two and damaged the third, but in the course of the combat operation lost eight bombers including 56 airmen.
Barris pointed out that of the 133 airmen specially chosen and trained in seven and a half weeks prior to the raid, nearly a quarter of those were Canadians. Thirty aircrew – pilots, navigators, flight engineers, wireless radio operators, bomb aimers and gunners – came from nearly every province in the country. What made the story equally important as a Canadian story, Barris pointed out, was that nearly half those chosen for the raid received their training in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan operated principally in Canada between 1939 and 1945.
“The elephant in the room is that almost half the Dam Busters received their air training in Canada,” Barris said, “and that’s not been recognized before.”
The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, who staged the presentation, houses among the largest collections of air-worthy wartime aircraft, including the Mynarski Memorial Lancaster, which towered over Barris and the audience during the presentation.
Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany is due for release in September, as a Patrick Crean Edition book from HarperCollins Canada.
(Photographs courtesy Eric Dumigan Photography – more images at: http://www.airic.ca/html/2018cwhdbraid.html)
The two almost did not meet. The couple nearly didn’t marry and become one of the most famous couples in 20th century Britain. But thanks to the intervention of Winston Churchill’s cousin, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, a visitor to Churchill’s family home – Blenheim Palace in England – Clementine Hozier did meet Winston in August 1908. They took a walk in the garden, dashed for cover during a rain shower and he finally proposed.
“I took two important decisions (at Blenheim),” the great wartime leader of Britain wrote later, “to be born and to marry.” (more…)